Peter Jackson has finally confirmed what he told us at Comic Con: his Hobbit movies will officially …
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Jackson justified this decision by explaining that he'd delve into Tolkien's expanded mythology of Middle-earth, but we all know Hollywood is just one big Potemkin village of smoke, mirrors, and shamfoolery where every day is Triple-Reverse Opposite Day. Here are the empirically real reasons why Jackson is directing a threequel to Lord of the Rings.

— The second film solely encompasses the scene where Bilbo and the dwarves escape from the Mirkwood Elves and ride the wine barrels to Lake-town. With his comrades trapped in the barrels, the Hobbit befriends a nearby party of enthusiastic and informative whitewater rafters. At this point, the narrative disintegrates wholesale into a documentary tour of New Zealand's choicest rapids, from natural splendor of the Motu River to the white-knuckle thrills of the Rangitata. Bilbo learns the importance of a lifejacket. After three hours of scenic froth, the most self-congratulatorily masturbatory film since Ocean's 12 concludes with the rafters paddling off into mist and the dwarves chalking up Bilbo's magical sojourn in the world's fifty-odd largest economy to rancid lembas bread.

— Motion-capture human highlight reel, Gollum actor, and Hobbit second unit director Andy Serkis is so pissed that the Academy Awards stiffed him for Rise of the Planet of the Apes that he volunteers to portray every single soldier in the Battle of the Five Armies himself. ("How will they deny me now?" he silently schemes.) The trilogy runs out of money once the Goblins show up. Serkis completes the Battle with several hundred shopping bag puppets, is nominated for a Spike TV Guys Choice award.

— Taking an unspoken cue from The Wiz, Peter Jackson directs an ill-advised musical coda to the series, The HipHopit, a rousing raptacular starring Skee-Lo Baggins and the Iron Wizard, Ghostface the Grey. The dwarves are rounded out with whatever members of the No Limit Army are still kicking around; Sisqo is dusted out of retirement to play Smaug.

— As a sympathetic sop to despondent Sherlock fans waiting for Season Three to finally just fucking air, the scene where an invisible Bilbo and Smaug match wits flies off the rails so improbably that the duo opens a detective agency in Lake-town. Smaug has a terrific cocaine habit.

— The second film is simply the trippy-as-shit 1977 Rankin/Bass Hobbit in its entirety, with the exception of the last 85 seconds. This final scene consists of Ian McKellen as Gandalf — eyes ruddy with pipe-weed — laboriously intoning, "And that, is how the adventure would go if we were all cartoons."

— In a moment of searing lucidity, Jackson scraps his plans for The HipHopit. This clarity proves fleeting, as he's immediately concussed by a runaway copy of The Silmarillion. The resulting head wound prompts him to commission a three-hour opera based on Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."

— Such Lord of the Rings favorites as Frodo and Legolas — who did not appear in the print edition of The Hobbit — are slated to pop up in Peter Jackson's version. Caving to studio pressure, Jackson devotes the second film to what the other LOTR cast members were up to during the events of The Hobbit. Audiences delight in Gimli's awkward adolescent years at Moria Prep and visit the Ringwraith's Clubhouse, where they meet Nazzy Dû, the only labrador to rule as a monarch of Middle-earth. Also, Merry and Pippin are spermatozoa.

— Because of intellectual property litigation so byzantine and mystifying that it defies time, space, and our ability to describe it here, a court rules that the word "hobbit" is an etymological bowdlerization of 1990s tabloid staple John Wayne Bobbitt's name.

Stymied by legal pressure and crushing attorney's fees, Peter Jackson must now bookend a single Hobbit film with Bobbitt's 1994 adult film debut John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and its 1996 follow-up, Frankenpenis.